While
(some of) the world watched the Large Hadron Collider power up,
fault, power up again and ultimately
land its first 7 TeV collisions, others may have gripped their
armchairs tightly, waiting for the planet-destroying black hole that
some claim the LHC is capable of creating. As one might be inclined
to notice, the Earth has made it through the ordeal just
fine.

However, whether these doomsday black hole concerns are
credible or not, a pair of scientists from Princeton University and
the University of British Columbia at Vancouver have been delving
into the relativistic physics calculations just to see what might
really happen. Matthew Choptuik from UBCV and Frans Pretorius from
Princeton have done the grunt work to solve field equations related
to soliton collisions at specific energies.

"Our
calculation produced results that most were expecting, but no one had
done the calculation before. People were just sort of assuming that
it would work out. Now that these simulations have been done, some
scientists will have a better idea of what to look for in terms of
trying to see if black holes are formed in LHC collisions,"
explained Choptuik.

Based on string theory and its extra
dimensions, Choptuik and Pretorious concluded that high-energy
collisions at the LHC could
indeed form black holes -- but the chances of them
destroying the world are pale even in comparison to the chance that
they would actually be detected by LHC equipment while they
exist.

Of the events, Choptuik says, "Some are already
taking this very seriously. However, I don’t think that we are
likely to actually see any black holes at the LHC, even if it is
possible."

Rather than directly observing such a
formation, he explains that to confirm the existence of the fleeting
matter-energy magnet, LHC scientists will have to study the debris
from the collision rather than the particles that instantaneously
exist and then disappear. A typical collision would leave jets of
debris while the short-lived black hole would produce a more
spherical pattern.

The duo's findings have been published in
the journal Physical
Review Letters,
titled "Ultrarelativistic Particle Collisions."

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